5 Digital Marketing Tips for Start-ups

Introduction

Starting a new business is exciting and frustrating at the same time. It’s exciting because of the possibilities but you often don’t know how or whether you will succeed in building a viable business. Fortunately, there are several digital marketing tips that can support your marketing efforts.

Digital Marketing Tips: Lead Generation

You can make assumptions about who will buy from you but you never really know. One way to convert new sales is to build a website and install Google Analytics (GA) on it. GA provides information about website visits such as pages that visitors read and how they arrive there.

For instance, you might find that most of your traffic comes from Twitter or from organic searches. You might also find that your website visitors spend more time on one type of content compared to another and fill out as contact form asking for more information thereafter. This means you have converted a website visitor into your sales funnel using content on your site.

Digital Marketing Tips: Strategies

The strategy that you employ depends on what you want to achieve. Start by creating an awareness of the problem that you want to solve for your customers. Often, your target customers know that there is a problem but they are unable to define it.

Another strategy could be to retain and deepen the relationship that you have with existing customers. Your marketing activities will differ in this instance. For example, you could provide more long-term customer support, incentivize repeat business or start regular webinars that arm your customers with tips and tricks for optimising their purchase.

Digital Marketing Tips: Competitor Knowledge

Many start-ups ignore the competition or they believe that they don’t have any competition. Online access presents a vast world of information about your competition, similar products and trends. Learn from your competitors.

Find out which social media platforms that they are most engaged with and see who their followers are. What is working for them and where could they improve? Always thrive to create a distinct competitive advantage rather than just copying your competitors.

Digital Marketing Tips: Creating a Budget

Planning a budget is difficult when you are starting a business. This is because you are not sure what is going to work to grow your sales pipeline. One of the best ways to create a focused budget is by choosing a strategy and executing it.

Experiment with different ways of generating brand awareness. Pick one or two social media platforms then manage them well, and ensure that you are measuring performance against your goals. Look at the sources of your web traffic and where your qualified leads originate from. Spend more in those areas.

Digital Marketing Tips: Planning for Growth

You need to be able to calculate what it costs you to acquire a customer. This is how you can forecast sales and grow. This cost is commonly called Cost of Customer Acquisition or COCA.

Here is an example of COCA using Facebook Ads. If your goal is 100 subscribers for your online course, you must first find out how many people need to click on your Facebook Ad in order to get 100 sign ups. Say your conversion rate is 1% on average. That means you need 10,000 people to click on your ad. If your cost per click on Facebook is roughly £0.20 (this varies from industry to industry and from ad to ad), it means you will spend £2,000 to acquire 100 subscribers. Therefore, your COCA is £20.

Other Considerations

There is also the case of customer lifetime value or LTV. And that better be larger than your COCA otherwise you will not sustain your business long term. More on that in my next post.